Doing serials copyright research

Welcome, and thank you for working on this project! We are trying to determine what serial issues held by the Penn Libraries are now in the public domain (that is, their copyrights have expired). With this information, we can potentially make digitized copies available both to the Penn community and to the world at large, both during and after the coronavirus crisis. We can also draw attention to serial issues that are being made freely available online by others.

We've made a table of some of the serial titles that the Penn Libraries hold that might have public domain issues. This largely consists of older historic issues that we call the "deep backfile". You can help fill in information on the parts of the table that are currently marked as "Unknown". Here's what to do:

• Go to the Penn Libraries deep backfiles page.
• Scroll down to a suitable starting point. (Your supervisor might designate one for you; if not, you can choose one that you like. It's a big table, so as long as it's not the very start of the table or some other obvious place, you're not likely to choose the exact same starting point as someone else.)
• Find a suitable serial with "Unknown" in the "First renewal" column (the 5th column).
• Select the "Contact us" link (in the last column in the row for that serial) to answer a series of questions that will help us determine the copyright status of the serial, and possibly also link to free online content. Consult this page on filling out the form for guidance on how to answer the questions.
• After pressing the "Submit this suggestion" button at the bottom of the form, select the "return to the Penn Libraries Deep backfile page" link to go back to the Penn Libraries deep backfiles page. The serial you just worked on should now have "Pending" appearing in the "First renewal" column (the 5th column).
• Choose another serial with "Unknown" in that column, and repeat.

Why we ask these questions

We know that copyrights from before 1925 have now expired in the United States. Some serial issues from 1925 and later are also no longer copyrighted, though, for various reasons:

• Copyrights that had to be renewed, but weren't, have also expired. Unrenewed serial issues published as late as 1963 may now be in the public domain. That's why we ask you to look up renewal information in some of our questions.
• Serials that had to be published with a copyright notice to get a copyright, but didn't have one, might also be in the public domain. Serial issues from as late as 1988 without a copyright notice may now be in the public domain. That's why we ask if you can examine serial issues to see if there's a copyright notice. (We realize, though, that while the library stacks are closed, you might not be able to do so in many cases.)
• However, serials that were not published in the United States may be exempt from renewal and notice requirements. That's why we ask you some questions on where the serials were published.

Some serial issues are made freely available by their publishers (or other authorized parties) even though they're still under copyright. That's why we ask you to look for such issues, and suggest some places to look for them.

What happens after you answer these questions

Once you answer the questions for a particular serial, the word "Pending" will appear by your serial in the column where "Unknown" used to appear. Eventually other folks will double-check the answers, create a data file in the JSON file format reflecting those answers, add that data file to our local knowledge base, and link it with Wikidata. The table will then be updated to reflect those checked answers. At the moment, we try to acknowledge your first submission within one business day, and get to more of your submissions every few days after that. (We're getting enough submissions now that it takes a while to get to everyone's, but the table will continue to update as we go through them.)

If you leave your name and contact information with your answers, we can credit you for the work, give feedback and answer questions you might have, and thank you for your help. We appreciate your work in helping to open access to historic serials for researchers at Penn and around the world!